Are you suffering from the endowment effect? (Marcom Pro)

The title of this week’s Marcom Pro Round-Up has nothing to do with Viagra-related spam e-mails.

The endowment effect was an expression coined by American economist Richard Thaler to describe our tendency to set a higher selling price on what we own (are endowed with) than what we would pay for the identical item if we did not own it. In Peter Bernstein’s excellent book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story Risk, there are numerous insightful examples of this effect in action (not to mention a host of other intriguing principles such as Prospect Theory and backwardation).

As Bernstein points out, the endowment effect arising from the nationality of the issuing company is a powerful influence on share valuations. Even though international diversification of investment portfolios has increased in recent years, Americans still hold mostly shares of American companies and Japanese investors hold mostly shares of Japanese companies, And yet, the US stock market is equal to only 35pc and the Japanese to only 30pc of the world market.

In a similar way, is marketing suffering from its own endowment effect? Are we still so heavily invested in the sunk costs of our traditional skills and tactics that we are failing to match our marketing investment with the reality of the world today?

Why the LinkedIn Insight Tag is a huge free bonus for B2B marketing

Andrew Smith August 8, 2018

The LinkedIn Insight Tag - have you installed it on your website?Have you even heard of it?
If not (and you are involved in any way with B2B marketing or PR), you are denying yourself a lot of insight about LinkedIn members who visit your web property. In fact, any organisation that would like to know more about the type and kind of professional person visiting their site can benefit from the Insight Tag.
So what